在2018年在北本宁顿的家中，她在家里的研究中。访谈仍然由斯蒂芬妮·布莱克（Stephanie Black）提供。
Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. In time, she put herself on another path. She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazineIngenue。我n the mid-’70s, she began to write for这Village Voice, but it was at这New Yorker, where she became a regular columnist for the Talk of the Town section, that everything changed for her. Her early fiction, much of which also appeared in that magazine, was collected inAt the Bottom of the River(1983), a book that, like her Talk stories, announced her themes, her style, the uncanny purity of her prose. She has published the novelsAnnie John(1985),Lucy（1990），这Autobiography of My Mother(1996),波特先生（2002），以及See Now Then（2013）。一本儿童读物，安妮，格温，礼来，帕姆和郁金香, 1986年出版。除了收集Talk Stories（2001年），她的非小说类作品包括一个小地方（1988），对安提瓜的殖民遗产的估计；我的兄弟（1997），悲剧的回忆录艾滋病in her family; and two books on gardening,我的花园（书）(1999) and在鲜花中：在喜马拉雅山散步(2005).
金凯德（Kincaid）将自己的时间分开在马萨诸塞州的剑桥（Cambridge），在那里她是哈佛大学的非裔美国人研究教授和佛蒙特州的本宁顿（Bennington），在那里，她的大棕色支架房屋带有黄色的窗户装饰，被树木遮挡。她有两个孩子，从婚姻到作曲家艾伦·肖恩（Allen Shawn）New Yorker编辑威廉·肖恩（William Shawn），在客厅里，她在桌子上展示了她的儿子和女儿多年来参加的艺术和工艺营地和班级的生产。她写的研究是一个日光浴室，窗户在三个侧面包围。从后门开始的露台以石头边界末端末端。草坪上种着数千种水仙花，倾斜到阴影茂密的小溪。附近是一个蔬菜花园，笼罩着野生动植物和一间住在特雷弗（Trevor）的小屋，她的年轻助手。在大约二十年的时间里，金凯德（Kincaid）制作了我的伴侣诗人詹姆斯·芬顿（James Fenton），称之为“植物园花园”，到处都是稀有物种。她的数百种植物被分层为非正式设计的组成，表达了她精致的美学和毫无困难的怪异性。她的植物会因为它们的外表或行为或由于历史而移动她的植物。
这次谈话始于2013年第92街Y的一次公共活动，八年后，八年后的2021年夏天，大流行的社会限制缓解了。牙买加·金凯德（Jamaica Kincaid）是一位慷慨的主人。她用天赋做饭。她的大而宽阔的眼镜唤起了六十年代的意大利电影明星。这些年过去了，但她仍然很高。她的声音一如既往地，高音，盎格鲁 - 加勒比海的灯笼般的诱人。她是一个存在；当她说话时，一切都开始发生。亲自和页面上，Kincaid的声音是一种文学声音。在讽刺的是，她的文学遗产没有预测她，崇高，勇敢，自由。
我NTERVIEWER
Why did your family send you to America? Wasn’t London still a capital of empire in the mid-’60s, the cultural center of the Commonwealth?
牙买加金凯德
我f they’d known anyone in London, they would have sent me there. But they didn’t have any long-term plan in mind. The idea wasn’t that I would establish myself and then have the rest of my family join me. I was simply sent away to support them. My father—my stepfather—had gotten ill, and my parents had three boy children. The arrival of my youngest brother had plunged us into a kind of poverty we’d never known. It used to be a tradition in agricultural families that you’d sacrifice the eldest child. I remember the darkness of being sent away—sheer misery of a kind that I didn’t know existed. Until then homesickness was something I only knew from books. I think I first came across it in one of the Brontës.
我NTERVIEWER
所以里面没有任何兴奋吗？
Kincaid
根本不是，因为我要去仆人。我记得在炎热的阳光下走到安提瓜的美国基地之一，当我们称为疯子庇护所和死房子时，pas着疯狂的房子，在那里死去的人的尸体被放在医院里，直到被他们收集到被他们收集到。the undertaker—to be interviewed by an American soldier’s wife. I was very bitter about it because I had before me what seemed to be a successful future. I might have gone to the University of the West Indies. I would have gotten a scholarship. It seemed cruel even to other people because I was known as what we called a “bright child.” No, there wasn’t any cause for celebration, though my mother did make me a new dress and see me off to the airport.
我NTERVIEWER
Thomeickness是您作品中的重要元素。
Kincaid
也许,但我从来都不觉得我是even in Antigua, even when I was little. My mother came from Dominica, and the thing about those little islands is that people from one island or the other don’t like each other. She was an outsider in Antigua, and she looked different. She was part Carib Indian, and they used to call her the Red Woman.
我想我的工作总是在哀悼某事，失去天堂 - 不是死后的事情，而是您以前的事物。我经常想到我兄弟出生的时间 - 这听起来很幼稚，但我不在乎 - 我和我母亲一直在一起的这个天堂。有时候，我和我的母亲会去游泳，她会消失一秒钟，我想象的深度只是滚过来，她会越来越深，我再也不会见到她了。 . . And then she would pop up somewhere else. Those memories are a constant source of some strange pleasure for me.
我was pulled out of school to take care of my youngest brother while my mother went to work, and when she realized I hadn’t been looking after him properly, that I had been reading instead, she gathered all the books I had stolen from the library over the years and burned them. You can probably tell from my writing that I’m obsessed with notions of justice and injustice—those things that are wrong that can never be made right.
如今，如果我要想家，那将是佛蒙特州的，这很奇怪。但是也许这是有道理的 - 我每天都在看到大海的地方长大，在我生命的尽头，我住在一个水耗尽的地方。
我NTERVIEWER
做过Lucycome out of a feeling that you needed to put your arrival to America in its place somehow—to examine it, or to leave it behind?
Kincaid
不t so much to put anything in its place as to give an account of what had happened to me.Lucy是关于一个人的成就。您可以在其中看到简爱。我在世界上独自一人的感觉，我有诚信。您可能想要这个，但我会这样做。露西停止将她的薪水送回家，而我确实停止了送我的薪水。我仍然有我在Bonwit Teller买的衣服。我是你见过的最好的保姆。
我NTERVIEWER
你在重新塑造自己吗？
Kincaid
我喜欢打扮和外出。您可能会说那是我母亲的影响。当我最小的哥哥出生时，她的生活已经崩溃了，但是我小时候她是一个非常优雅的女人。我曾经很ham愧与她见面，因为她是如此性感 - 各个年龄段的人都会阻止她并与她交谈。我记得她在法国卷中穿着头发，她穿着他们所谓的霍布尔裙子。
搬到纽约后，我为像史蒂文·梅塞尔（Steven Meisel）这样的人建模。我显然有一个饮食问题之一，但我不知道它们是什么。我不知道我有什么名字可以诊断出来的。我最终吸烟了幸运的罢工，只是因为我喜欢它的外观，手势。由于某种原因，我决定剪掉头发，然后将其漂白。我穿着旧衣服，旧货店的衣服。
我styled myself to look like no one else. And I also knew I didn’t want to write like anyone else. When I started writing Talk pieces at这New Yorker, I tried to get away from the anonymous “we” they used. They had very good writers, but they were these old, stout white men. I hated the we. I had such contempt for a certain kind of writing, which I would now call “white writing.” It was so dull and mannered.
